


Pro Patria

by Mertiya



Series: A Study Into Darkness [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Angst, Feels, M/M, Star Trek Into Darkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 15:39:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The crew of the starship Enterprise realize the only way to stop Khan is to find a way to convince him that his own crew is not dead.  Research about him uncovers some unexpected facts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pro Patria

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Pro Patria](https://archiveofourown.org/works/830907) by [opium_smoker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opium_smoker/pseuds/opium_smoker), [raveness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raveness/pseuds/raveness)



> I'm sure someone has already done the obligatory Star Trek/Sherlock crossover, but I just saw Into Darkness last night and I had to write this.
> 
> Edit: Oh my gosh, many, many thanks to opium_smoker for translating this into Russian! I am so INCREDIBLY flattered, and also just thanks to EVERYONE for all your support, it means so much to me.

            As the ship plummets, screaming, earthward, he can feel the bones of it coming apart around him; it mirrors the tumult tearing through his insides, the roaring pain he thought he’d escaped when he heard the blond starship captain say _there are seventy-two torpedoes_.  But he watched them burst, watched them flame apart into fragments, forced to watch as they burned in pyres of his own making (and no one should have to feel this pain twice).  Because seventy-two is greater than four, and the relief he felt, _mind ticking logically from one point to the next, because yes, follow the logic, the logic cannot lie, the logic never lies,_ he would have taken much worse than the beating the captain gave him ( _painful, but pain is nothing but an indication of mortality_ ), buoyed by that relief.

            But zero is less than four; they are gone, and their blood is once again on his hands.  And the others, seventy-two minus four is sixty-eight, and he knew them, once, as well, but they are burning and screaming as well.  Sixty-eight he did not want to know, to care about, but he was made to care because his four cared, and now he wishes more than anything he had never learned to care.

            _Alone.  Alone is what protects me.  Alone is what I have._

Now there is nothing left but loneliness and vengeance.  He opens his mouth and tells the computer to take this ship to Starfleet Headquarters.  He is still quite capable of making an explosive device, and he does not believe even the impact of reentry will be enough to stop him.

            He has fallen before.

~

            Spock’s mind was ticking desperately, logically, from point to point to point, even through the flood of pain which threatened to overwhelm him, the pain he had promised himself he would not _feel_ again.  But, contrary to popular belief (to a popular belief which he had to admit Vulcans were fond of cultivating), Vulcans felt emotions much as humans did; they simply controlled them.

            Only his Vulcan training had allowed him not to break down when he watched his planet, his home, his roots, ripped apart in front of him, and it was only his Vulcan training now that gave him the strength to look into Jim’s dying eyes.  “Jim,” he said quietly, laying his hand against the glass.  
            “Spock,” Jim wheezed.  “Spock, I’m scared.”  His voice broke a little, and Spock had to force himself not to look away.

            “Yes,” he said.  “I know.”  His mind would not stop working, even now, even as he prepared to mourn, because it was not over.  This was not over as long as Khan Noonien Singh was free and alive, and if Jim Kirk was dying, the command of this ship, at least, would fall to him.

            “Please, tell me how not to be scared…”

            “I wish that I could,” Spock answered, _but all I can tell you, Jim, is how not to let that fear control you, and you are past that now_.  He knew the second half would be cold comfort, and he left it unspoken.

            Jim huffed out a smile.  “I thought you were the emotionless one.”

            All Spock could do was shake his head.  “No, Jim.”

            He watched his friend suck in another rattling breath and breathe it out, and it was over.  Spock turned away and did not look at Mr. Scott.  “Spock to the bridge,” he said, but he had to say it twice, because his voice wavered the first time.

            “Sulu here, Mr. Spock.”

            “Captain Kirk is dead.  Under the circumstances, I am in command until the current emergency is past.  Can you advise Starfleet Headquarters of the situation?”

            There was a pause.  “Negative, sir, our communications are out.  And sir—I’m sorry.”

            Spock breathed the pain in.  There would be time for grief later; time for mourning.  “Understood, Mr. Sulu.”  He turned to Mr. Scott.  “I need you to work on the communications, Mr. Scott.  They are the number one priority.”

            “But, sir, the captain—“

            “I am acting captain, Mr. Scott.  The communications, if you please.”

            “Yes, sir.”

            He headed for the turbolift and paged the crew as he went.  “Attention, crew of the USS Enterprise.  This your acting captain speaking.  All available engineers, meet Mr. Scott in engineering A and assist him in restoring communications.  All other available hands, I need every piece of data currently extant on Khan Noonien Singh.  Spock out.”

Khan was intelligent, but he was human, and unstable.  He believed that his crew, his “family”, as he put it, were dead, and they had no way of disabusing him of that notion.  Even were they able to communicate with him, it would likely be fruitless to try and reason with him.  He would go to ground as soon as possible, then reappear, probably imminently, to wreak as much havoc as possible.  With limited resources, they might anticipate him, but it would be difficult to stop him, unless—

            “Spock to sickbay,” Spock snapped as he strode onto the bridge.

            “McCoy here.”  McCoy’s voice was laden with the edge of tears, and, for a moment, Spock envied him, but he brushed it aside.

            “I need you to do something for me, Doctor.”

~

            Agony splintered up through his leg, and he gasped with it, a purely physical reaction, which he scorned, knowing the bone would knit.  His heart would not, and he snorted at the sentimental metaphor.  It used to be so easy to divorce himself from his feelings, but things had changed, and he had been broken and reforged time and again.

            He stumbled out of the wreckage, slipped into the gawking crowd.  Child’s play to stand and stare at the smoke and debris like everyone else.  Simple psychology. Simple people, simple, loathsome beasts.  All of them living and breathing while his friends were ash and dust.

             He waited until Starfleet officials began to appear, and then he made his way through the crowd, head tipped slightly downward, simply a man deep in thought.  Funny how his hands trembled in his pockets.  _Body’s betraying me_ —but those thoughts led to a place and a name he wanted to forget, cutting him apart and piecing him back together wrong (wronger now).

            All that was left was to find a few simple materials, make his way into the core of Starfleet, and spread the fire that still, constantly, consumed his thoughts and heart.

~

            Leonard McCoy bent over the cryogenic chamber, staring into it.  “Spock thinks I’m a miracle-worker,” he complained to the still-faced girl inside it, whose lips still bore traces of lipstick, a little poignantly.  He kept his back to the still body on the bed behind him, because he was crying enough already; anymore was seriously going to impair his ability to perform this miracle.

            At least his hands were steady.  “Do you know anything about this?” he snapped at Carol Marcus, who had her head bent over one of the computer consoles in the medbay, feverishly searching, like most of the rest of the crew, for something that still eluded them.  She shook her head.  “I’m sorry, doctor,” she said.  “I don’t know.  I understand the torpedoes, but that isn’t the same technology as the torpedo.”

            “Figures,” grunted McCoy.  “Theoretically, they unfroze him, should be able to unfreeze someone else, but they also had a full team of Starfleet’s finest.  Me, I’ve just got me.”  He was talking aloud, but Marcus would presumably ignore it unless she felt she had something to add, and if he didn’t keep talking, he would find his mind slipping back to Jim and--no.  He couldn’t now, because thinking about Jim made him want to lie down and sleep forever, and the man who’d done this was still out there.

            Nothing to do but keep working.  He passed an absent hand across the still, furry body of the tribble he had been experimenting on earlier and paused in shock when he felt it tremble.

~

            “Commander, I’ve got something.”  Spock looked up from the console, where he had been busily trying to reroute more emergency power for Mr. Scott to use, but communications were still down, and looked to be down for the foreseeable future.  Ironically, the transporters appeared to be somewhat easier to repair.

            Nyota paused with her hands on the keyboard.  “This was buried very deep, sir, and the records are incomplete.  I think a lot of the information was lost in the third world war.”

            “What do you have, Lieutenant?” Spock asked, rising to stand behind her; he did not wait for her to answer as he began to read over her shoulder.

            _The Baskerville Project._

            Fascinating.

~

            It was so easy.

            How could any of them have thought they could stop him?  It was so easy.  He had to laugh a little.  All he needed was a fuel converter, simply procured, a simple sob story to the proprietor of the shop about an ailing mother and a pressing need to return home within the hour, an honest, pleading smile, a compliment on her hair ( _“you’ve done something different with your hair today” no, no, no, be quiet, be silent, SHUT UP_ ), and the fuel converter was his.  He didn’t even need to manipulate anyone for the other materials.  He thought about hacking the lock of the second store, but eventually he didn’t bother; he simply kicked the glass in.  He wouldn’t be here for long enough to be caught in any case.  No need for subtlety at this point.

            There would soon be nothing but a conflagration, an inferno consuming the heart of the enemy—and he had to stop, because his mind was swimming with images of cool water and the threat of explosive flames, a gun in his hand, and his hand trembling for the first time under the threat of a strange, raw, new emotion.

            He walked on.

~

            “McCoy to bridge.  I think we’ve done it.”

            “On my way, doctor.”

            When Spock reached sickbay, Doctor McCoy was bending with a grim expression over one of the cryogenic chambers.  “Let’s hope this works,” he said, glancing up.  “Are you sure this is the right man?  I don’t know if we have enough power to do another revival with the way this old bucket of bolts isn’t holding up.”  He tried to sound lighthearted, but his anxiety was transparent.  Spock considered for a moment, and then put a hand on his shoulder. 

            “I am ninety-two point three percent certain.”

            McCoy cracked a smile.  “Calculate those odds yourself?”

            Spock shook his head.  “I would have been slightly more optimistic than the facial recognition algorithm.”

            “Spock…” McCoy’s voice was shaking, and for the first time, Spock realized that this was not simple sorrow.  The doctor drew him to the side.  “There’s something else.”  He nodded his head to the side of the room, where a tribble was happily rocking back and forth on the dissection table, making cooing noises to itself.  “Khan’s blood.”

            The realization hit Spock sudden and fast, like the feeling of his stomach dropping as he plummeted into the volcano, except it was like the sudden discovery that he had a lifeline after all and was no longer floundering directionless.  “You believe that one of Khan’s crew will have a similar physiology?”

            “It’s a chance,” McCoy said.  “It’s so close to the time of death— _maybe_."

            The cryogenic chamber made a sudden beeping noise, and McCoy turned all his attention back to it.  “Well,” he said succinctly.  “Here goes nothing.”

            He made a few adjustments and stepped back.  The chamber hissed, and a puff of steam was released into the air above it.  The lid creaked reluctantly and then both Spock and McCoy heard movement shifting inside.

            “Careful now,” said McCoy.  “No sudden movements there, you’ve been asleep for a long time.”

            He ran a mediscanner across the shifting figure in the cradle, let out a long breath, and Spock felt himself lose a minuscule edge of tension as well.  “Welcome to the twenty-fourth century, Doctor,” McCoy said.  “Sorry for the rough awakening, but we need your help.”

~

            “Khan isn’t his real name either.”

            “Lieutenant?”

            “It’s a code name.  The word _khan_ means ‘leader’ in certain older earth dialects.”

            “Is there anything else?”

            “Yes.  The experiments they did on genetic modification did not have anything to do with intellect.  He was chosen because of his intelligence; from what I can find in these records, though they’re incomplete, they wanted—a conqueror.”

            “They achieved that.”

~

            He was tired.  He cracked his head back and forth to get rid of an annoying crick in his neck.  He was waiting.

            He had considered not waiting, but he knew that the Vulcan would find him sooner or later, and they would come to stop him.  He wanted to watch the looks on their faces when they realized they could not--that they could do nothing to stop him as he spread his hands and let the flames curl up and consume everything.

            He thought he might laugh, but—no.  He shied away from the thought of bright, manic laughter, blood and brains ( _he was blood and brains_ , _they had made that quite clear_ ), blood and brains he could watch on a computer screen as they played with them ( _his own brother, but it’s for king & country_), and he was laughing because ( _there were no kings now, so what was it for_?) 

            He heard the whine of the transporter, and let his finger lazily graze the detonator beside his hand.  The noise was coming from behind him.  Clever.  Presumably they had restored some sensor capabilities then.  Hoping to catch him off guard.

            “It won’t work, you know,” he said to the people behind him.  “It was a nice attempt at stealth, but I have heightened senses.  They ensured that.”

            “Yes, the Baskerville Project, wasn’t it?”  It was the clipped, emotionless voice of the Vulcan.

            “You seem to know a lot,” he answered, even as, “Don’t be cruel,” said another voice, but it blended with his own.

            “Was that cruel?  It wasn’t intended to be.”  The Vulcan sounded vaguely intrigued, emotionless, and he wished he could reach that state again, that happy medium of intellectual interest and stimulation, without the way these emotions seemed to attack him from the inside now, rip him apart, take him limb from limb starting with his weakest flank.

            “I’m not actually dead.” This time he heard the voice clearly, though it was tired and faint.  “Sherlock, I don’t—I don’t really understand what’s been going on, but I’m not dead.  Please just…don’t do anything stupid, all right, you git.”

            He was cold.  _Eliminate the impossible, whatever remains_ —impossibilities, improbabilities—he turned.

            “Of course.  You even said it.  Said you’d send me _my torpedoes._ ”  He was amazed he hadn’t seen it, but his head was such a mixed-up muddle since his awakening—no, since well before then.  His eyesight, however, was perfectly functional.  It wasn’t deceiving him.  Couldn’t be.  _Don’t let this be a trick_.

            He was slightly stooped, leaning heavily against the Vulcan, his other arm supported by the brown-haired doctor, his blond hair so heavily streaked with white.  So tired.  He had been tired, too, when they woke him up. “John.”

            “Yeah.”

            “The others?”

            “They’re safe.”  Of course they were safe.  Stupid, stupid.  So used to barbarians—the Baskerville Project, the Admiral who had awakened him—but it was hundreds of years in the future; they weren’t all barbarians.  He set the detonator carefully on the ground and stood, loosely. 

            “I surrender,” he breathed, and he was swaying, because he had been so afraid ( _seventy-two torpedoes, the captain showing evidence of radiation exposure, but healed—they’d given him John’s blood, but John was just tired, not hurt, just tired, tired--)_

            “My head hurts,” he said softly.

            “Let me go,” John said.

            “We can still help you—“

            “No.  Just me.  He needs me.  Let me _go_.”

            John shook his arms free and stumbled across the room to stand in front of him.   John was standing in front of him.  He leaned forward and traced his fingers up the rough fabric of the cryogenic suit, and time skipped forward; his face was buried between John’s knees ( _he could smell John, he smelled like John, even alongside the distinct odor of must and old chemicals_ ), and he was crying.  How peculiar.  John’s hand in his hair.

            “Sherlock, Christ.  It’s all right.  It’s all _right_.”

            Was he Sherlock?  The name didn’t sit quite right, but then Khan had been worse, and John Harrison was a nothing-name.  He had been Sherlock, certainly, and he’d had John.

            His hands moved slowly up across old places, sense-memories so faded he could barely access them.  But that was the dip of John’s spine, the hollow of his temple, the scratch of his day-old stubble. 

            “Oh god, what did they do to you,” John was murmuring, hands gathering him safe into the hollow of his arms.  “I knew it, I told him this would break you.”

            John had been in cryogenic sleep almost from the beginning; he’d grown used to obedience, all for John, just to keep John safe, at first searching for a way out, but he lost the way to think about that properly at some point.  “Fuck queen and country, fuck your brother, fuck it all.”

            “I agreed,” Sherlock said, and he thought it might be true, though he wasn’t certain, but his voice was cracking, and there were still tears, so hard to think through the tears. 

            “Shhhhhhh, shhh.”  John rocked him back and forth, and he continued his exploration, nosing down John’s collarbone, sliding his hands down John’s elbows, John’s breath on his hair.  He slid his cheek against John’s, the feeling indescribable (but all he could deduce now was question-marks, his brain still occupied with ticking through strategies he didn’t even care about, moving silently from scenario to scenario, nothing calm, nothing--)

            “ _Sherlock_.  Look at me.”  He looked up; ah, yes, John’s eyes, cold, clear blue, like ice, but warm ice, because John was not cold, and then John’s lips were on his, soft but solid, and he pulled at them eagerly for a moment, before turning away.

            “What, you don’t like my kisses anymore?” John sounded faintly indignant ( _also worried, trying not to show it, but always transparent, to me, at least_ ).

            “I don’t…deserve…” It was the only thing he could get out, the only way he could try to explain the darkness lurking inside his head.  “Side of the angels, only.  And not even that, any longer.”

            “Bollocks.”  John tipped his face up again, kissed him fiercely this time, and he let the tide of John wash over him and ran his hands across him, elbows and knees and ears, eyes (John protested a bit but let him), feet, touching, exploring, proving.  _Impossibilities, improbabilities_.

~

            McCoy shuffled his feet uncomfortably.  “Spock, for god’s sake, don’t _watch_ them,” he said in a low voice.

            “Why not?” Spock asked, curiously.

            “Because…” McCoy waved a helpless hand.  “You can’t _do_ things like that.  Also are you going to tell me who he is?  You never said they were _lovers_ , for Chrissake!”

            “I was not aware it was relevant,” Spock said.  “Besides that, I didn’t know.”

            “God, he’s such an insane bastard, but I can’t help but feel bad for him,” McCoy said.

            “Yes, I believe we’ll find that a great deal of his unstable behavior is attributable to the changes the Baskerville Project introduced to his brain chemistry.  He will stand trial, but I believe the sentence will be medical, not punitive.”

            “I’d say you’re awfully calm about this, but you always are,” McCoy groused.  “Doesn’t it bother you even a little?  All those people who died…”

            “And all the people who did not,” Spock reminded him.  “If it had not been for Sherlock Holmes, I imagine we would be in a war with the Klingons right now.  I suspect the casualties would have been bigger by at least an order of magnitude.  However, to be truthful—yes, it does bother me.  But I believe what I am saying is right, for all that.”

            “And Jim is going to make a full recovery,” McCoy added, with a satisfied smile.  “I knew you cared, dammit, I _knew_ it.”

            “Doctor, isn’t saying ‘I told you so’ a little childish?”

            “Oh yeah, very.”  He poked Spock in the ribs with his elbow.  “Hey, I told you so.”

            Spock raised an eyebrow at him and quietly inspected the residual pain he still felt from his mind-meld with Captain Pike.  He knew that there would be some men and women screaming for Khan’s blood.  He knew, too, that the crew of the _Enterprise_ would not be among them.  And Khan’s hands were not clean, but Jim was alive, and the true blame behind many of the deaths lay squarely at Admiral Marcus’ door.

            And Jim was alive.

            He seemed to be rather fixated on that fact.

            He looked across the room at Khan and his doctor, half-entwined on the floor, thought of Nyota being alive, Jim being alive—

            “Stop _watching_ them!  It’s not decent!”

            And the good doctor was very much alive as well.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I was quite disappointed with the way they caught Khan in the movie, and I thought they missed an opportunity to use his family, since that was such a big character motivation (both in Into Darkness AND in The Wrath of Khan), plus Benedict Cumberbatch did such a damn good job, I just had to write this. I really hope you enjoyed it! :)


End file.
